Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Republicans in disarray!

No one could have predicted…

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

The willow is too close to the house.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

It’s easier to kill a dangerous animal than a man who just happens to have different thoughts/values than one’s own.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Joe Lieberman disappointingly reemerged to remind us that he’s still alive.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

“In the name of Zandar, I will fight the Stupid!”

‘Museums aren’t America’s attic for its racist shit.’

Their freedom requires your slavery.

You are here: Home / Politics / Biden Administration in Action / Thursday Morning Open Thread: Staunchly Positive

Thursday Morning Open Thread: Staunchly Positive

by | 61 Comments

This post is in: , ,

It’s one way to drive his enemies crazy…


More at the link:

Joe Biden plans several stops during a visit to Asia this spring, which will be his first to the region as president and include a summit with three key regional allies in Japan, a senior administration official told Reuters.

The official brushed off questions about whether the Ukraine crisis could distract the administration’s attention from Asia, saying: “We continue prioritizing our Indo-Pacific focus and will have more to come.”

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity on Wednesday, declined to give details of the other stops in the region, which Biden’s administration has declared its priority as it seeks to push back against China’s expanding power and influence.

U.S. officials have said Biden has accepted an invitation to visit Japan in late spring to attend the summit of the Quad, which groups Japan, the United States, Australia and India, but details were still being worked out.

A person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday the trip could be in May, with concerns over China and North Korea on top of the agenda, and that Washington was looking into having Biden visit South Korea at the same time…

Be careful about storm conditions, everybody — especially you Texans:

Reader Interactions

61Comments

  3. 3.

    OzarkHillbilly

    On the cancer front, to repeat myself, I saw this at the Guardian:

    Two of the first human patients to be treated with a revolutionary therapy that engineers immune cells to target specific types of cancer still possess cancer-killing cells a decade later with no sign of their illness returning.

    The finding suggests CAR T-cell therapy constitutes a “cure” for certain blood cancers, although adapting it to treat solid tumours is proving more challenging.

    CAR – chimeric antigen receptor – T-cell therapy works by genetically engineering an individual’s T-cells to recognise and destroy cancer cells.

    T-cells are a type of white blood cell that can recognise and destroy foreign cells, including cancer cells, but because cancer is very good at evading immune detection, they often miss their mark. CAR T-cells are engineered to make them better at detecting cancer cells.
    …………………….
    “We call these cells a living therapy, but it was a big surprise to us that they are still able to kill cancer cells 10 years after infusion,” June said. “We can’t say whether every last cancer cell was gone within three weeks [of treatment], or it could be that they keep coming up like whack-a-mole and then get killed, but we know that these [CAR T-cells] are on patrol. They persist and they are functional.”

    Hmmmm… Engineering our immune systems…

    Guess we won’t have to share this life saving treatment with all the anti-vaxers. Who knows what this treatment does to a person 30 or 40 years later.

    Anyway, all snark aside, it’s a game changer.

  4. 4.

    OzarkHillbilly

    A historic steel bridge in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam is to be partly dismantled to allow a superyacht built for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to pass, local authorities have announced.

    Bezos’s gigantic, 430-million-euro ($485m) yacht is too big for the iconic Koningshaven Bridge, which dates from 1878 and was rebuilt after being bombed by the Nazis in 1940 during the second world war.

    The shipyard building the three-masted mammoth in Alblasserdam, near Rotterdam, has asked the local council to remove the bridge’s central section so it can pass through. “It’s the only route to the sea,” a spokesperson for the mayor of Rotterdam told AFP, adding that the Amazon owner would foot the bill for the operation. The decision has angered some in the Netherlands as the local council promised after a major renovation in 2017 that it would never again dismantle the bridge, known to Rotterdammers as De Hef.

    The mayor’s office emphasised the economic benefits and jobs created by the construction of the boat, but promised that the bridge would be rebuilt in its current form. The middle section of the huge steel-girdered bridge will be removed to give enough clearance for the 40-metre (130-foot) high boat, Dutch media reported.

    Here in America we have bridges collapsing beneath our feet, while our Congress critters argue over not just how much we are willing to spend to fix them and how much we will need to borrow to pay for it, but whether we need to fix them at all.

    Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos is paying out of pocket to dismantle and rebuild a 144 y.o. historic bridge just so he can have his own personal 127 meter long by 40 meter high mega-monstrosity that he will probably only use a few weeks every year.

    I wonder how many Amazon packages were transported across the Fern Hollow Bridge.

  7. 7.

    Baud

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Apparently, it’s not a working bridge anymore.  And the Dutch wanted to do it because they wanted the honor of building the world’s largest private yacht.

  9. 9.

    Asparagus Aspersions

    @Baud: ​
      The GOP grifters must already be licking their chops. “Why try a cutting-edge gene therapy developed by the eggheads at the NIH, when you can just snort my crushed up mixture of light bulbs and Excedrin?”

  10. 10.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Baud: They could have sailed it underneath, partially completed, and finished construction elsewhere.

    Bezos giving Musk a strong run in the asshole Olympics.

  12. 12.

    Geminid

    There will be a kind of gun summit in the Big Apple today. President Biden and Attorney General Garland will fly to New York and meet with New York City Mayor Eric Adams and New York Governor Kathy Hochul at 12:15pm, at the NYPD headquarters. The principal topic will be taking illegal guns off the streets. (Garland has already tasked federal prosecutors across the nation to focus on this problem). Later in the day the President and Mayor will also attend an event in Queens focused on community intervention.    From this morning’s Politico Playbook.

  14. 14.

    Betty Cracker

    I’m hoping the lead article at CNN right now sparks a “let’s you and him fight” moment. Headline: “DeSantis strategizes for his future while Trump obsesses over his election loss”

    This part is kinda dumb though:

    If Trump’s growing extremism results in increasing skepticism about his prospects in a general election or if he destroys his own brand or is unable to run for another reason, DeSantis will be in pole position for the Republican primary.

    Growing extremism? DeSantis is already outflanking Trump to the right on COVID denial, educator harassment, protest suppression, etc.

  16. 16.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Betty Cracker: I’m hoping TFG destroys Desantis’s reelection bid.

    On the topic of educator harassment, my former colleagues at Iowa State are now required to take “free speech training.” I don’t know what the content of the training is. I’m unutterably grateful to be retired and in another state.

  17. 17.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Baud: Some of the Dutch wanted it built there, like everybody who works at that shipyard. And more than a few others I’m sure. Still, the “local council promised after a major renovation in 2017 that it would never again dismantle the bridge,” And it’s true that trains no longer use it, but I wonder if pedestrians do?

    Regardless, maybe Bezos can pay to fix a few bridges over here that are in use?

  19. 19.

    Starfish

    One of the responses that I was to one of the tweets focusing on cancer was positively unhinged. It was frustration at going back to normal during the pandemic and just setting up cancer patients to catch COVID, but Biden’s tweet was so anodyne that responding to it this way seemed way out there.

    We can end cancer as we know it.— President Biden (@POTUS) February 2, 2022

     

    Actually, a lot of responses to the tweet above are nuts.

    Anyway, it seemed like the governors wanted him to shift focus from the pandemic, and people were pissed at the blatant attempt to do just that.

    The way that we have been keeping things over and saying “Good luck to those of you who cannot gain immunity from the vaccines” has not been great.

  20. 20.

    satby

    So, we’re at 13 inches of fallen snow here on the southeast side of S.Bend. More predicted today. C.K.Dexter Haven was doing joyful zoomies in the yard at 6am, BEFORE I HAD MY COFFEE (!); which is only a problem because he has a 25 foot leash and I had to keep spinning in circles to not get wrapped up in it. My boots come up to my knees, and the snow is as tall as my boots. Sure is pretty though.

  21. 21.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    I’ve certainly been wrong before, but isn’t DeSantis really far Right for Florida? I know all the jokes, etc but it’s a huge state and it’s really diverse. I just look at Ohio with Kasich and then DeWine – another perhaps former swing state that is now red – and they are MUCH less “performative far Right” than DeSantis is.

    What do independents think of his stunts for the base? Are they watching and approving or not watching?

  22. 22.

    satby

    @Starfish: The way that we have been keeping things over and saying “Good luck to those of you who cannot gain immunity from the vaccines” has not been great.

    Immunocompromised people can be in danger from the most innocuous germs, not just covid, so what’s your solution? It’s been that way forever, remember the boy in the bubble? This isn’t a new thing either with the vaccines (any) or the pandemic, though a pandemic certainly increases the risk.

  24. 24.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kay: I don’t really believe in the polling fairy anymore, but DeSantis’s approval ratings have been kind of swingy according to those unreliable instruments. During the omicron surge, he tanked according to some polls but has since bounced back according to others. A recent poll shows him beating either of the two top Dems challenging him by single digits but with a lot of voters undecided.

    You’d think his hard-right antics would have alienated a lot of voters since this isn’t Alabama. But if so, it’s hard to tell. It’s possible a lot of people just aren’t paying attention. I believe the Dem primary is in August? That’ll make the choice more clear cut. It’s a weird state and hard to read.

  25. 25.

    Starfish

    @satby: My younger sister is 39 years old. She was diagnosed with cancer this past year. The post-chemo medicine she is on lowers her white blood cell count, so her immunity is low.

    Young people did not have to struggle through cancer in the level of loneliness she is experiencing right now. They could have visitors,  outings, and other basic distractions.

    She is working part-time from home (which is one of the benefits of the pandemic), so she can maintain her health insurance.

    This is hard.

  26. 26.

    dww44

    Just viewed on the Sinclair owned local Fox broadcast affiliate… news person talking about how Biden is in for a tough news day  on the economic front while encountering really difficult issues like Russia/Ukraine at the start of a 2nd tough year…. This all the while there was a chyron running below her reporting jobless claims falling

    .  Sinclair is more evil  than Fox, Newsmax,  etc.  They take control of the local news room in an under the radar manner.

  28. 28.

    Spanky

    So glad to see that Pope Manchin has given his blessings to the President’s prospective appointees.

  32. 32.

    satby

    @Starfish: you know it’s hard for everyone, right? Lots of old people (like me) didn’t expect that our quickly dwindling healthy years would be spent alone and isolated either. I’m sorry about your sister. It’s sad that she’s lonely at such a tough time in her life. She’s not alone in that.

  33. 33.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    All of the economic reporting has been horrible. It’s ideological. They simply don’t back the “higher inflation but higher employment” approach – they want to go back to low inflation and high unemployment. They were just deeply uncomfortable with giving subsidies to individuals and small businesses to weather a catastrophe. They think economic pain for the lower tiers is the natural order, and cheap labor should be endlessly available. I wil never forget that when the labor shortages started showing up they all blamed stimulus checks and the federal unemployment boost and they stuck to that for months. Just pure opinion- this is how they believe low wage workers will react to income supports- they’ll stop working- and they just went with their belief. It wasn’t that we were at nearly full employment and it’s a real labor shortage- workers were just kicking back spending their Biden Bucks.

  35. 35.

    sab

    @Kay: It may just be that Ohio has mechanisms in place to make elections more fair. In Florida the party in charge really runs the elections, so what people want doesn’t matter as much. It’s a legacy of Jim Crow all over the South.

  36. 36.

    Starfish

    @satby: I do know it is hard for everyone. I was talking to her last weekend, and it was just sad. My mom is going up to visit for her birthday. She was having some friends visit occasionally.

    She is in New York, and they are just past peak omicron, and some of her friends are still going to restaurants. She is not comfortable with the friends who are dining out during peak omicron visiting.

  37. 37.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Starfish: Young people did not have to struggle through cancer in the level of loneliness she is experiencing right now. They could have visitors,  outings, and other basic distractions.

    What you are saying about outings has never been the case. When you are neutropenic (low on white blood cells) due to chemotherapy even the flu can potentially kill you. Your age is immaterial. In fact the medical protocol for a cancer patient is to be under medical observation in a hospital if you have a fever. And there have always been strict protocols about hospital facilities that house cancer patients that include vacuum sealed rooms. And doctors and visitors donning PPEs.

  38. 38.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, the fight continues in the trenches in Virginia…

    Republicans celebrate Black History Month by trying to ban the teaching of Black History.

    Democrats celebrate it by putting that bill in the trash can where it belongs. https://t.co/56dP579tAf

    — L. Louise Lucas (@SenLouiseLucas) February 3, 2022

    We have to fight them every single day. Good people are out there doing so and we need to have their backs. And not give up.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  39. 39.

    NotMax

    Science tidbit.

    Humans have cooked with fire for millennia, but it may be time for a change. Natural gas appliances warm the planet in two ways: generating carbon dioxide by burning natural gas as a fuel and leaking unburned methane into the air. A new Stanford-led study reveals that the methane leaking from natural gas-burning stoves inside U.S. homes has a climate impact comparable to the carbon dioxide emissions from about 500,000 gasoline-powered cars.Source

  41. 41.

    schrodingers_cat

    @satby: Agreed. According to “progressives” in quotes because it signifies the red roses and gingivitis Twitter. Nothing Biden does is ever right. He is always wrong.

    Why did he send only 4 tests was their latest whine.

  44. 44.

    Starfish

    @schrodingers_cat: When my sister was hospitalized for her surgery, visiting hours were cut to four hours a day. You could only have a maximum of two visitors during that four hours. The hospital was understaffed on the people doing basic care like bathing the patients.

    Right now, all the people I know having babies are turned around and out the door in a shorter period of time than the before times. It used to be 2 days after a normal birth in the hospital and 4 after a c-section, I am pretty sure they have cut that down to 1 day and 3 days.

    When the hospitals are overwhelmed with COVID cases, it is affecting all other care in weird ways, so I am not sure what is happening with cancer patients with a fever.

  45. 45.

    Geminid

    @Another Scott: Virginia Senate Majority Leader Lucas has really met her moment. When she isn’t helping her Democratic colleages block stupid Republican legislation, the feisty 77 year-old is flinging high-and-inside fastballs at Youngkin on her Twitter account, @SenLouiseLucas.

  46. 46.

    gene108

    @Baud:

     

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I read Ozark’s link. It’s going to be the world’s largest sailing yacht. The height is from the three sailing masts that will be on it.

    I wonder, if it can actually move just by wind power?

  48. 48.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Betty Cracker: I follow a lot of theme-park fandom stuff on YouTube. The big buzz from yesterday is that SeaWorld (the owner of the SeaWorld and Busch Gardens parks) has made a takeover bid for Cedar Fair (a far bigger operator that owns a lot of parks like Cedar Point, Knott’s Berry Farm, Kings Island and Kings Dominion).

    It’s somewhat shocking news since, going into the pandemic, SeaWorld was already still reeling from the long tail of the “Blackfish” controversy and had been having financial problems. A priori we might expect Cedar Fair to be trying to buy SeaWorld, not the reverse.

    What does this have to do with anything? Well, COVID hit the theme-park industry hard, of course, but while Cedar Fair and SeaWorld both have parks in red and blue states, more of SeaWorld’s parks are in states like Florida and Texas that have aggressively disdained COVID interventions and let people pack into theme parks earlier, whereas more of Cedar Fair’s are in states that shut down harder and they were, corporate-wide, quite a bit more cautious, which hit them hard financially.

    So this may really be a story of COVID denialism (especially in Florida) winning the day.

  49. 49.

    gene108

    @satby:

    Immunocompromised people can be in danger from the most innocuous germs, not just covid, so what’s your solution? It’s been that way forever, remember the boy in the bubble?

    1. The boy in the bubble is an extreme case.
    2. Immunocompromised constitutes a wide range of illnesses, such as inflammatory autoimmune disorders like psoriasis or Crohn’s disease, immunodeficiency disorders that are there from birth, acquired such as HIV, or temporary due treatment for other diseases like cancer, immunosupressed transplant recipients*, and others I can’t think of.
    3. The need to restrict contact will vary based on the cause, or the severity of the immunocompromised condition, which can change at different times, such as a Crohn’s disease patient having a flare up and being put on prednisone that reduces inflammation but can also reduce immune response, or a transplant patient increasing the dosage of immunosuppressant drugs they take.
    4. COVID is a helluva a lot more contagious than any airborne or surface born virus or bacteria that was commonly encountered pre-COVID.
    5. There has been very little done to determine the efficacy of vaccines on various immunocompromised populations. What has been done, from what I have read, had involved sample sizes of less than 100 individuals. Therefore the statement that mRNA COVID vaccines are 90%-95% effective may not at all apply to this population. No one definitively knows. It’s get the jabs and hope you can mount an immune response of some kind.
    6. Not every immunocompromised person can get vaccinated. Some have acquired or genetic conditions that prevent this, such as people starting chemo for cancer treatment, in the case of the former.

    * I’m a transplant recipient. The disregard of the get back to normal crowd of the vulnerable populations has irked me, to put it mildly.

  51. 51.

    gvg

    @NotMax: Since our population is over 300 million and we have a lot of cars, I think that stove leak might not be as significant part of the problem as it seems like.

    It may be easier to fix than some other problems though. Maybe build better stoves?

    I have one and I have issues with it. I have found it gets knocked on easily which is why I bought a gas detector alarm. The knobs don’t lock tight. I can buy some after market ones for 30 each that supposedly do but it seems like it should be a safety reg. I also hate that the knobs are on the front as it is too easy to brush them on. They should be on top or along the side or something.

    We need to just improve a lot of efficiencies in many many things, go down a list and improve by steps.

  52. 52.

    satby

    @gene108: And I’m on steroids for asthma, not as severe an immune dampener as transplant drugs for sure; but we’ve almost always been somewhat on our own managing risk (probably milder affected people like me much more vs. you). A virus that was unknown just over two years ago has a lot we still have to discover about how it affects the body. I am not at all an advocate for “getting over covid”.

    My question to Starfish was “what is the solution?” , and the subsequent answers all boiled down to “it sucks because it’s different than before”. YES, it does. But there it is.

  53. 53.

    Ohio Mom

    @Nicole: As far as I can tell, breast cancer is divided into four types because each type is based on cell receptors we either have ways of acting on with drugs or not — e.g., if the cancer cells have lots of estrogen receptors, there is a protocol for that and we call that a type, if no/not enough estrogen receptors, that’s another type.

    All medical scientists have to do is identify a way of turning off an up-until-now un-influenceable receptor and voila — a new breast cancer subtype is created.

    Doesn’t change your statement — reinforces it, actually — that there are so many different types of cancer that there isn’t going to be one single breakthrough that conquers it. I think we’ll always have cancer but if we are lucky, treatments will keep improving and increasing quality of life.

  54. 54.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Ohio Mom:

    that there are so many different types of cancer that there isn’t going to be one single breakthrough that conquers it. I think we’ll always have cancer but if we are lucky, treatments will keep improving and increasing quality of life.

    News stories in which someone says this are always ones where you should particularly avoid reading the comments–they’re always full of people saying that doctors all know the cancer cure but are suppressing it in a big conspiracy.

  55. 55.

    Ohio Mom

    @Starfish: Sounds like your sister’s medical team is making sure she is getting the treatment she needs no matter what the Covid stresses on their local system are. That is a hopeful sign, I think.

    It’s tough enough to be going through the treatment your sister is in the best of times, no doubt Covid is making it worse and of course that breaks your heart. Just another reason to look forward to a Covid lull, that may open some options for you and your sister. In tne meantime, we will send good thought your way.

  58. 58.

    Ohio Mom

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): This is a welcome change, you are trying on what I call “an ethic of optimism” (borrowed that from Josh Marshall, you may be able to find his essay on this via google).

    As Another Scott keeps reminding us, we have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and appreciate that there are good people working hard to make things better.

  59. 59.

    evodevo

    @dww44: ​
    They bought out Local 12 teevee station in Cincy and two of their signature news anchors, who had been with the station for YEARS and were local celebs, quit.
    Braun was the city’s longest-tenured evening news anchor when he announced June 17 he was leaving after 35 years on June 28, at the end of his contract. He explained on Facebook that he turned down a “generous contract” offer because it was “time to move on. I don’t feel I fit well with the Sinclair News model.”
    He was a good guy and a popular celeb – there really hasn’t been anyone to replace them…

    https://www.wvxu.org/media/2019-07-09/cammy-dierking-leaving-wkrc-in-dec-leaving-

  60. 60.

    Kathleen

    @evodevo:  I know! Good for Rob Braun and Cami. Was kind of surprised about Rob TBH. I never watch 12. I prefer 5 except Kelly ‘s replacement in the morning is unwatchable so I’ve switched to 9. (Progressive Life Coach Dr. Rick: “No one cares if you detest Megan Mitchell and want Kelly back.”)

  61. 61.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @Kathleen:

    Progressive Life Coach Dr. Rick.

    ?  Some friends gave me what I can only describe as a golf jacket for my birthday, so I’m rocking that “It pulls a little to the left” look. But I have to admit that it’s very comfortable and just the right weight for most of my ventures out into the coronasphere.

Comments are closed.